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“What is that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?”
Apollodorus “The Library” III.v.7-8
In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles builds a whole plot based on something well known by everyone at that time, and we may say that it is still well known. Thus, this something remains unsaid in the play. The question of the Sphinx has this quality - namely, it is well known by everybody so it can allow itself to remain unuttered.
The issue of identity appears to follow a similar path, given its well-known character, most of the time it leaves things unsaid. Identity eludes an outright definition, just like time eludes our grasp in Augustine's Confessions (1912, p. 239), if we don't seek it we know what it is, but if we do, it slips into the unknown, because identity slips by similar to time, as the latter is a fundamental element of identity, obviously ignoring the fact that both of them evade the definition so well.
The exercise of conceptualizing identity, seen as a state of mind which engenders the experience of our uniqueness, coherence and authenticity (e.g. Auchincloss, 2012), brings us to question the ego, time and subjectivity, dream life, interpersonal relationships and their dynamics, the conscious and unconscious, personal or/and transgenerational histories, development in its complex and continuous transformations, the body and sexuality, talents and abilities, trauma and deficit, religion or religions, the false and the authentic, the maturity and the infantile, pertaining to one or to several languages, to one or to several cultures, to one group or…